ABSTRACT
The four papers grouped in this section call attention to the many factors that shaped non-religious travel in the late antique world. Elton reminds us of the basic constraints that geography placed on state and military travel in this period. Watts discusses the way educational centers rose and fell during Late Antiquity and presents travel in terms of the relation of centers to peripheries, issues of interest in current scholarly discussion of the late antique world and its transformation. Cam Grey discusses evidence for the movement of rural laborers from one landlord's estate to another. Analysis of this kind of travel contributes to the ongoing reassessment of the juridical and economic status of the colonate in the Late Empire and the disparities between legal representations of the group and their actual condition 'on the ground'. Some of Grey's rural laborers traveled from estate to estate on roads. These roads are the subject of the last paper in this section. In it Ray Laurence discusses the multiple functions of milestones along the late antique road system. They not only measured distance for the traveler but also communicated a variety of state-sponsored messages to those who moved along the road system. Laurence thus call attention to an underutilized form of evidence drawn from late antique material culture that can help us to understand change in the political world. Laurence also emphasizes the communicative aspects of the milestone system and thus points to the second section of papers in this collection.
